Anthropic, the "Constitutional AI" foundation model startup from San Francisco that is perhaps the foremost rival to OpenAI, made a big move this week, bringing its Claude 2 large language model (LLM) chatbot to 95 countries total, including:

  • Albania

  • Algeria

  • Antigua and Barbuda

  • Argentina

  • Australia

  • Bahamas

  • Bangladesh

  • Barbados

  • Belize

  • Benin

  • Bhutan

  • Bolivia

  • Botswana

  • Cape Verde

  • Chile

  • Colombia

  • Congo

  • Costa Rica

  • Dominica

  • Dominican Republic

  • East Timor

  • Ecuador

  • El Salvador

  • Fiji

  • Gambia

  • Georgia

  • Ghana

  • Guatemala

  • Guinea-Bissau

  • Guyana

  • Honduras

  • India

  • Indonesia

  • Israel

  • Ivory Coast

  • Jamaica

  • Japan

  • Kenya

  • Kiribati

  • Kuwait

  • Lebanon

  • Lesotho

  • Liberia

  • Madagascar

  • Malawi

  • Malaysia

  • Maldives

  • Marshall Islands

  • Mauritius

  • Mexico

  • Micronesia

  • Mongolia

  • Mozambique

  • Namibia

  • Nauru

  • Nepal

  • New Zealand

  • Niger

  • Nigeria

  • Oman

  • Palau

  • Palestine

  • Panama

  • Papua New Guinea

  • Paraguay

  • Peru

  • Philippines

  • Qatar

  • Rwanda

  • Saint Kitts and Nevis

  • Saint Lucia

  • Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

  • Samoa

  • São Tomé and Príncipe

  • Senegal

  • Seychelles

  • Sierra Leone

  • Singapore

  • Solomon Islands

  • South Africa

  • South Korea

  • Sri Lanka

  • Suriname

  • Taiwan

  • Thailand

  • Tonga

  • Trinidad and Tobago

  • Tuvalu

  • Ukraine

  • United Arab Emirates

  • United Kingdom

  • United States

  • Uruguay

  • Vanuatu

  • Zambia

"We’re rolling out access to Claude.ai to more people around the world," the company posted on X (formerly Twitter). "Starting today, users in 95 countries can talk to Claude and get help with their professional or day-to-day tasks...Since launching in July, millions of users have leveraged Claude’s expansive memory, 100K token context window and file upload feature. Claude has helped them analyze data, improve their writing and even talk to books and research papers."

However, among those nations conspicuously left off the list was the home of some of VentureBeat's own contributors: Canada.

Canada remains elusive for some AI applications

Interestingly, Google's Bard AI chatbot is also not yet available in the hockey-loving, beaver-ridden country, though OpenAI's ChatGPT is. And of course, Toronto AI startup Cohere is also based in the country.

Asked by VentureBeat about why Anthropic had not yet brought Claude 2 to Canada, and if it was in the works, a spokesperson responded via email to say: "I can share that the team is diligently working to make Claude available in Canada as soon as possible."

That's in line with the company's message on X as well, where it posted: "We’re working hard to responsibly expand availability over the coming months—and will have more to share soon."

The lack of a definitive reason and timeline may be cold comfort to our Canadian contributors, but at least there is something to look forward to. Some contributors reported that Poe, the AI model aggregator subscription service from Quora, did allow them to access Claude 2 from Canada.

Canadian politicians have taken a hard line towards AI regulations, so their tough talk may be ensuring more due diligence from U.S. AI companies looking to expand there.

Anthropic recently secured an up to $4 billion commitment from Amazon and another $100 million from South Korea Telecom (SKT), so it certainly has no shortage of cash to help it along its quest. The company has also earned praise from users for Claude 2's ability to parse PDFs. However, as of now, it lacks some of the image generation and multimodal/audio/video/web browsing features of ChatGPT.